On Oct 4, 12:51am, Neil A. Carson wrote:
> Subject: Re: What happened to autobuild?
> Chris G. Demetriou wrote:
>
> > You, Causality, may not be able to write a driver and give it away in
> > source form, since you agreed to an NDA.
> >
> > However, is there any reason that The NetBSD Project couldn't _accept_
> > a driver written by a third party, assuming it had a not-unreasonable
> > pedigree?
>
> The NDA was with the RiscBSD kernel team, rather than Causality.
> Providing Cumana don't decide to take Russel to court (just in case he
> reverse engineered or anything---I'm not alleging he did/has) then I
> guess we could make use of the info.

Provided that no members of the RiscBSD kernel team are involved (see below).
In my earlier email on the subject 'we' referred to the mailinglist/NetBSD, not
the RiscBSD kernel team.

> Don't know about any accuracies as this lot, as I'm not into law :-)

It is probably more relevant that NetBSD as a whole is not covered by the NDA
so nobody in the RiscBSD team necessarily has to be involved anywhere in the
process. Of course NetBSD would still have to establish that Russell obtained
the info legally. From a purely legal standpoint it may be possible for the
RiscBSD team to use Russell's information directly but that depends heavily on
the wording of the NDA (which I have not read - nor have I seen any of the
information from Cumana or anything derived from it) but I suspect that a more
important consideration is what to do from a PR point of view.

Cheers

Rob